Kurt Loder

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The Canyons isn’t the worst movie I’ve seen this year. It’s not even the worst movie I’ve seen this summer. It has a pronounced lean-and-hungry look (it was shot in three weeks on a budget of $200,000, much of it

The fact that somebody would spend $185 million to whomp up a big monsters-versus-robots movie of the sort that the old Toho mutant-lizard factory would have tossed off for a few bucks and change 60 years ago is surely a

The Way, Way Back is a sunny wonder, a movie made for virtual pocket change (less than $5 million) that effortlessly out-classes such floundering box-office behemoths as The Lone Ranger and White House Down. The script, by actors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, who

Louis Leterrier’s Now You See Me has an appealing comic spirit, and it’s a considerable amount of fun, in parts. It concerns four talented but low-level illusionist-hustlers: one card master (Jesse Eisenberg), one mentalist (Woody Harrelson), one daring escape artist (Isla Fisher),

The most surprising thing about Iron Man 3–which is otherwise pretty much what you’d expect, in spades–is its unanticipated sense of finality. The movie plays out like the concluding installment of a standard trilogy, with the story winding down into tidy

Matthew McConaughey’s mid-career resurgence is a glorious thing, and it continues with Mud. Over the past decade, McConaughey has sometimes wasted his talent in dim rom-coms (How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Failure to Launch, Fool’s Gold) or just coasted

Upstream Color marked the debut of a freshly minted film-school graduate, it might be dismissed as pretentious nonsense. Or maybe not. In any case, Shane Carruth, the 40-year-old Texan who did assemble this strange picture, has never set foot in a

Sitting through Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder is like watching a stranger sorting through a packet of old photographs. To the photographer, the snapshots recall a story. To us they’re disconnected episodes in an unknown narrative. The people we see in them

Danny Boyle’s dreamland psycho-thriller Trance elevates plot-knotting mind games to a delirious new level. It would be wrong to say too much about the story’s ever-deepening complications, and difficult to do so in any case. Let’s just say this: James McAvoy plays Simon, an

The Place Beyond the Pines is a movie in three parts, tracking the lives of a doomed loser and a conflicted cop and contemplating the interlocked fates they pass on to their children. Fortunately–this being a film that runs two hours

When last seen on Hollywood soil, in the 2012 Red Dawn remake, evil North Korean invaders had touched down in Spokane, WA, where they were quickly butt-kicked by a bunch of teenagers. Having learned nothing from that experience, the Norks are now

Sam Raimi’s grand and magical new picture recalls the sense of wonder that movies could once awaken in us. Unlike such recent 3D fantasy riffs as Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters and Jack the Giant Slayer (which tanked last weekend), Raimi’s Oz the Great

In a big old house deep in the country, the Stoker family is weathering a storm of portents. Dad just died in a puzzling automotive mishap, and now, with mom wandering around with a never-empty glass of wine spot-welded to

As even one of the thugs in the tired, monotonous, and generally unnecessary A Good Day to Die Hard notes, this isn’t the ’80s anymore. And this fifth installment of the Die Hard franchise, which is now 25 years old, has none of the

Warm Bodies suggests what the Twilight films might have been if the Twilight films didn’t, you know, suck. This movie is also a tale of forbidden young interspecies love, but it’s self-aware and funny and really charming. Basically, it’s a reworking of Romeo and Juliet (there’s even

January slouches on with the release of “Gangster Squad,” a bloody revision of the old Warner Bros. crime films of the 1930s. The story begins in 1949 in Los Angeles, a city thick with vice and corruption, where snarling mob

“Amour” has already won the top prize at Cannes, and is now Austria’s submission for Best Foreign Language Film at this year’s Oscars. Here, director Michael Haneke, a master of icy appraisal and the unflinching lockdown shot, closely contemplates an

Over the last 30-odd years, I have somehow managed to remain innocent of all things “Les Misérables.” From its germination in Paris through its conquest of London’s West End, its 16 years on Broadway (plus another two in revival), its

With “Django Unchained,” Quentin Tarantino finally comes of age as a filmmaker. Tarantino’s brilliance as a writer and craftsman have always been clear. But even his last picture, the Holocaust revenge fantasy “Inglourious Basterds,” was overwhelmed by his geeky obsession with vintage

Well, Peter Jackson is no George Lucas, I’m happy to report, and his new Middle-earth prequel is no “Phantom Menace.” But the movie is a disappointment, and not only because it fails to equal the grand achievement of Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy

“Deadfall” has most of the elements of a good tricky noir: sex, love, doom, death. But the movie is dogged by intermittent listlessness, and it never quite comes together. About halfway in you can tell that the film itself is doomed.

The concept of organized crime as a dark mirror image of American capitalism was firmly established in “The Godfather” 40 years ago. But it seems to be a hot new idea for writer-director Andrew Dominik, who beats it to death throughout

Ang Lee’s “Life of Pi” is more than just a rip-roaring boy’s adventure. Much more, unfortunately. The movie is an adaptation of an award-winning 2001 novel by Canadian writer Yann Martel. The core of the story concerns a 17-year-old Indian

Just back from eight months in a mental institution, to which he’d been consigned after pounding a guy he caught nude-showering with his wife, ex-school teacher Pat Solitano has returned home to Philadelphia to discover … that he has no

With “Skyfall,” the transformation of James Bond from the steely womanizer of the old Ian Fleming spy novels and the early Sean Connery movies is complete. Reinvigorated six years ago in the wake of the first two “Bourne” films, with